What is usability? Remove the jargon and it's just common sense.

What is usability and user experience? The Web is so full of jargon and buzzwords it's easy to easy to write off terms that like as more of the same. But, while somewhat clunky, these two terms do state exactly what they are. How usable is something? How good was your experience using it?

Let's look at a weather site for some basic usability. I need to know if my outdoor practice will be rained out tonight so I go to weather.com. I'm not sure where to start looking in the navigation until I see a search box where I can get local weather info.

Great start - right until a Mentos ad popped up and my fingers reflexively twitched toward the command+w keys. Like all the users we've tested, I hate pop-up ads that hi-jack the content I asked for. But I restrained my trigger finger and the info I need is available in a variety of presentations on the same page. There's not much chance of rain so I'm ready to gear up for practice.

Overall I was able to find what I was looking for right off the home page. Score one point for task-based usability! However, I'm not sure how I'd find anything without the search box. Let's see if I can find a satellite map of the weather in my friend's town, where she's been without electricity due to storms.

Starting from the home page, I click on the "maps" link under the big picture. The first things I see on the new page are animated ads. Next, a list of map options: outdoor activities, health and safety or weather details. I don't know the difference so I'll try "weather details".

Now there's another menu with at least 20 options that don't mean anything to me (US regions, US satellite, severe alerts, short term forecasts). When I pick a map to enlarge it doesn't identify any cities or get big enough to make an informed guess about what cities are under the glowing green blob.

At this point I'm muttering out loud and ready to just start Googling. That's a huge ding in the usability points - confusing your user to the point where she just leaves the site is exactly what you don't want to do.

Finding a satellite weather map on a site dedicated to weather shouldn't be this difficult. But the glut of options and lack of explanation about what any of it meant left me confused, irritated and empty-handed. Although it did leave me with inspiration for a blog entry about bad user experience.

Usability isn't about what you hope people will do or what advertisers want them to do. It isn't about being the most cutting-edge, the most expensive or providing the most options. Often those frills end up making something that's more frustrating than useful. Good user experience means your users are able to do what they need to do, simple as that.